Capercaillie Emergency Plan scientific advisory group meeting notes - September 2025

Sci­entif­ic Advis­ory Group — Caper­cail­lie Emer­gency Plan Meet­ing note

Tues­day 23 Septem­ber, 10.00 – 12.30 | Forest Lodge, Aber­nethy and Teams

Attendees

• Alice Broome — Forest Research, Seni­or Sci­ent­ist — Pri­or­ity spe­cies / habitats
• Car­o­lyn Robertson — Park Author­ity, Cairngorms Nature Manager
• Chris Suth­er­land — Uni­ver­sity of St Andrews, Read­er of Statistics
• Dave Par­ish — NatureScot, Ter­restri­al Ornithologist
• Helen Senn — RZSS, Head of Con­ser­va­tion and Sci­ence Programmes
• Jason Mat­thi­opoulos — Uni­ver­sity of Glas­gow, Head of Eco­logy and Envir­on­ment­al Change
• Kathy Fletch­er — GWCT, Seni­or Sci­ent­ist Scot­tish Upland Research
• Steven Ewing — RSPB, Seni­or Con­ser­va­tion Scientist
• Stu­art MacQuar­rie — NatureScot, Deputy Dir­ect­or Nature and Cli­mate Change (Chair)

Apo­lo­gies

• Xavi­er Lambin — Uni­ver­sity of Aber­deen, Pro­fess­or of Ecology

Meet­ing sum­mary The group reviewed and dis­cussed a draft Research and Mon­it­or­ing Plan for the Caper­cail­lie Emer­gency Plan. The draft included all the inter­ven­tions included in the Caper­cail­lie Emer­gency Plan, their object­ives, meas­ures of suc­cess, and the mon­it­or­ing data cur­rently avail­able. Mem­bers were asked to high­light key areas where mon­it­or­ing data is miss­ing or insuf­fi­cient and sug­gest which data col­lec­tion and or data gaps should be prioritised.

Key points raised by the group included the need for:

• Con­sist­ency in mon­it­or­ing approaches across sites where inter­ven­tions are being delivered
• Bet­ter gran­u­lar­ity of data where pos­sible, includ­ing pre­cise inter­ven­tion detail, e.g. graz­ing regimes, fence and cor­res­pond­ing lek locations
• Improved align­ment of data­sets spa­tially and temporally
• Integ­ra­tion of exist­ing and future data into CaperMap as a cent­ral repository
• Resourcing to sus­tain mon­it­or­ing pro­grammes and the Integ­rated Caper­cail­lie Pop­u­la­tion Model
• Clar­ity on suc­cess indic­at­ors, ensur­ing pop­u­la­tion-level out­comes are included along­side site-based meas­ures of success
• Acknow­ledge­ment of inter­de­pend­en­cies where suc­cess is linked to oth­er strategies, e.g. deer management

The Research and Mon­it­or­ing Plan needs to be in place by the end of the year, with an updated draft to be cir­cu­lated in response to the meet­ing. It was acknow­ledged that the plan will need to remain flex­ible over the Emer­gency Plan peri­od, adapt­ing as new data­sets and resources become available.

Key dis­cus­sion points Coordin­a­tion and consistency

• Con­sist­ency in mon­it­or­ing across sites is essen­tial, includ­ing mon­it­or­ing at the right scale and fre­quency to detect impacts. It’s import­ant to under­stand the gran­u­lar­ity of avail­able data so gaps can be identified.
• Mon­it­or­ing regimes should be rep­lic­able and sus­tain­able. RSPB’s large-scale tri­al on cattle graz­ing and rob­ocut­ting, mon­itored with cam­era traps, will help determ­ine wheth­er the cam­era net­work is fit for wider use. Smal­ler-scale mon­it­or­ing remains import­ant, with res­ults feed­ing into the broad­er dataset.
• The need for spe­cif­ic inter­ven­tion records was high­lighted, e.g. graz­ing regimes rather than gen­er­al graz­ing zones, not­ing that most cattle graz­ing in wood­lands for caper­cail­lie wear no fence GPS col­lars that can provide fine-scale graz­ing data.
• To put new data into con­text and sup­port mod­el­ling, data from past inter­ven­tions, e.g. delivered through the Cairngorms Caper­cail­lie Pro­ject, should be included in the plan.
• Pop­u­la­tion-level out­comes remain a key suc­cess indic­at­or yet to be defined. This war­rants fur­ther dis­cus­sion as does the scope for mon­it­or­ing out­side cur­rent core caper­cail­lie areas. Recom­mend­a­tions were made that there should be a focus on where caper­cail­lie might exist in future, in addi­tion to where they are cur­rently. A more detailed, hab­it­at and con­nectiv­ity driv­en invest­ig­a­tion could identi­fy poten­tial caper­cail­lie areas bey­ond the cur­rent core sites.

Hab­it­at improve­ment and expansion

• Mon­it­or­ing forest stand struc­ture and con­nectiv­ity could be most bene­fi­cial, par­tic­u­larly identi­fy­ing areas where stand struc­ture is, or is pro­jec­ted to be, most favour­able to caper­cail­lie as iden­ti­fied through the EU LIFE pro­ject — Urgent Con­ser­va­tion Man­age­ment for Scot­tish Capercaillie.
• Tools such as Forestry and Land Scotland’s sub-com­part­ment data­base with growth mod­el­ling, LiD­AR sur­veys and aer­i­al pho­to­graphy all offer poten­tial to mon­it­or stand struc­ture and con­nectiv­ity, though some products are still in devel­op­ment and or lim­ited to spe­cif­ic areas. Cur­rent LiD­AR work across the Cairngorms Con­nect land­scape aims to help identi­fy which ele­ments with­in more widely avail­able satel­lite data are most inform­at­ive. This will be valu­able in the longer term. Data cur­rently avail­able through this work includes ground-truthed LiD­AR data from the Cairngorms Con­nect land­scape show­ing blae­berry and heath­er-dom­in­ated understories.

Redu­cing the impacts of predation

• Cur­rently vole sur­vey points and cam­era traps mon­it­or­ing pred­at­ors and caper­cail­lie are not spa­tially or tem­por­ally aligned. Align­ment is essen­tial to link vole avail­ab­il­ity, pred­at­or dens­ity, and caper­cail­lie out­comes, mak­ing the data far more power­ful for assess­ing success.
• Main­tain­ing vole sur­veys is essen­tial but cur­rently the sur­veys face logist­ic­al con­straints, so sup­port is required. Resource is also needed to main­tain pred­at­or mon­it­or­ing. As part of the Cairngorms Con­nect Pred­at­or Pro­ject there is near-com­plete cov­er­age of the wooded areas of the Cairngorms Con­nect land­scape using cam­era traps, cre­at­ing an emer­ging time series of stand­ard­ised data on the mam­mali­an pred­at­or com­munity. The cam­er­as are paired with audio record­ers to cap­ture the wider pred­at­or com­munity. Resource is needed to keep this mon­it­or­ing going and to poten­tially extend it to cre­ate a wider mon­it­or­ing pro­gramme. This could sup­port the action in the Emer­gency Plan to study pred­at­or activ­ity in rela­tion to caper­cail­lie hen dens­it­ies and breed­ing per­form­ance in all areas where pred­at­or man­age­ment strategies are in place, i.e. diver­sion­ary feed­ing and leth­al fox and crow control.
• Data on the exact loc­a­tion and tim­ing of diver­sion­ary feed­ing (grid ref­er­ences of feed­ing sites) is avail­able and should be col­lec­ted annu­ally. Pine marten dis­tri­bu­tion sur­veys have begun, though it was noted dens­ity vari­ation will be more use­ful than baseline presence.

Fence remov­al and marking

• There is a need to extend data­sets his­tor­ic­ally, to under­stand where fences have been in the past as well as today. A tem­por­al and spa­tial recon­struc­tion of fence dens­ity would help to cap­ture the impact that fences have had on the caper­cail­lie pop­u­la­tion and quanti­fy the impacts of mark­ing versus removal.
• The Urgent Con­ser­va­tion Man­age­ment for Scot­tish Caper­cail­lie pro­ject which involved a lot of work mark­ing and remov­ing fen­cing, may provide access to his­tor­ic­al fence data­sets. Aer­i­al pho­to­graphy may also be use­ful for build­ing tem­por­al cov­er­age. It was sug­ges­ted that all pos­sible data sources on fences be lis­ted, with oppor­tun­it­ies explored to integ­rate and recon­struct these into his­tor­ic­al lay­ers. While gaps in his­tor­ic­al data remain, for­ward pro­jec­tions can still be made under plaus­ible assump­tions about pop­u­la­tion impacts, but the more past data we can recon­struct, the more robustly we can mod­el fence remov­al impacts.
• A fence invent­ory, which includes cur­rent and recor­ded fences in core caper­cail­lie areas will be included in CaperMap and access­ible to the group.
• For fences, the focus is on spa­tially expli­cit man­age­ment — remov­ing par­tic­u­lar fences with­in 5km of spe­cif­ic lek sites, so the Integ­rated Caper­cail­lie Pop­u­la­tion Mod­el needs to run spa­tially expli­cit pro­jec­tion scen­ari­os. Cur­rently, fence impacts are being assessed at a broad level in terms of mor­tal­ity, but we need to geor­e­fer­ence which leks are dir­ectly affected by fence removals so that this can be integ­rated into the modelling.
• Con­cerns were raised about meas­ur­ing net reduc­tions in fen­cing through deer con­trol, since this is not dir­ectly influ­enced by the Caper­cail­lie Emer­gency Plan. It was sug­ges­ted that the Research and Mon­it­or­ing Plan should flag this inter­de­pend­ency and oth­ers includ­ing data flows and capa­city to col­lect data.

Redu­cing disturbance

• There is ongo­ing interest in under­stand­ing how far caper­cail­lie are dis­placed by dis­turb­ance, how this var­ies with dis­turb­ance intens­ity, and what the cumu­lat­ive impacts are. Six nation­al sur­veys provide stand­ard­ised baseline dis­tri­bu­tion data, but there are con­cerns about wheth­er the survey’s tem­por­al scale can cap­ture the nuanced impacts of inter­ven­tions, espe­cially giv­en pop­u­la­tion fluc­tu­ations linked to vole cycles.
• Act­iveX­change data looks prom­ising, offer­ing anonymised smart­phone GPS data at 100m² res­ol­u­tion, includ­ing intens­ity of human use — some­thing pre­vi­ously miss­ing. This could be linked with nation­al sur­vey data to assess dis­turb­ance impacts. There may also be a social sci­ence gap in the group’s expert­ise to inform man­age­ment responses.

• Data align­ment remains a chal­lenge — brood data from counts with dogs declines toward 2020, while recre­ation­al dis­turb­ance data increases from 2022, leav­ing lim­ited over­lap. Expand­ing the cam­era trap net­work to cap­ture birds and broods may help. Over­all, there is a need for more evid­ence on the impacts of inter­ven­tions to reduce dis­turb­ance, mak­ing site-spe­cif­ic mon­it­or­ing critical.

• There is poten­tial to com­bine Act­iveX­change and Strava data. Ques­tions remain about how rep­res­ent­at­ive Strava users are of the wider vis­it­or pop­u­la­tion. The Cairngorms Con­nect cam­era net­work also gath­ers recre­ation­al data, with cam­er­as placed both on and off-path. Data from this mon­it­or­ing is avail­able at a daily, path level resolution.

Caper­cail­lie monitoring

• His­tor­ic­al pro­ductiv­ity data from brood counts with dogs is only con­sist­ently avail­able at a forest scale. This lim­its its use­ful­ness when mul­tiple inter­ven­tions occur in dif­fer­ent parts of the same forest. If cam­er­as are used to col­lect pro­ductiv­ity data, cov­er­age must be con­sist­ent across sites to ensure comparability.
• The next nation­al sur­vey (2027÷28) will meas­ure caper­cail­lie pop­u­la­tion change at a wider scale, com­ple­ment­ing site-spe­cif­ic data­sets. The group has an import­ant role in recog­nising and sup­port­ing the value of the nation­al sur­vey as part of the broad­er evid­ence base. Link­ing the sur­vey with the Integ­rated Caper­cail­lie Pop­u­la­tion Mod­el has already improved con­fid­ence levels.
• Find­ings from the recent Gamebird Release Report, com­mis­sioned by the Park Author­ity and under­taken by GWCT, may provide insights for the action in the Emer­gency Plan to devel­op a pro­gramme of infec­tious dis­ease sur­veil­lance for caper­cail­lie and sym­patric Galliformes.

Rein­force­ment feasibility

• A good out­come could be to ensure that all ele­ments required for a trans­lo­ca­tion licence applic­a­tion have been assessed for feasibility.

CaperMap

• The group will have inde­pend­ent access to CaperMap. As more data­sets feed in, the tool will provide an inter­act­ive, inter­rog­able geodata­base, allow­ing data to be aggreg­ated at dif­fer­ent scales and high­light­ing oppor­tun­it­ies for high­er-res­ol­u­tion mon­it­or­ing. Mem­bers are encour­aged to con­trib­ute their caper­cail­lie data to max­im­ise its value. Ideally, CaperMap should serve as a single repos­it­ory where data from sep­ar­ate pro­jects can be com­bined to cre­ate a more power­ful tool. CaperMap also has the poten­tial to serve as a pub­lic-facing and report­ing tool, help­ing stake­hold­ers visu­al­ise pro­gress through the Caper­cail­lie Emer­gency Plan.
• Cur­rently with­in CaperMap, caper­cail­lie dis­tri­bu­tion data is not stat­ist­ic­ally linked to hab­it­at data to pre­dict dens­ity or occur­rence prob­ab­il­ity, and hab­it­at suit­ab­il­ity mod­el­ling remains a gap. RSPB aims to address this with a pro­posed pro­ject to be com­pleted by 2027, sub­ject to funding.

Actions:

1. Alice to share more inform­a­tion on the cur­rent work to mon­it­or forest stand structures.
2. Chris to liaise with Amber (PhD stu­dent) to share more detail on the Cairngorms Con­nect LiD­AR data­set avail­able for poten­tial use.
3. Chris to share details of a sur­vey explor­ing what mes­saging would motiv­ate people to adopt pro-envir­on­ment­al beha­viours to bene­fit capercaillie.
4. Car­o­lyn to update the draft Research and Mon­it­or­ing Plan in response to the key points raised and cir­cu­late the draft for comment.